[DougofTheAbaci]

 
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.Wait where the heck did you get ALAC's itunes doesnt offer much just cuz its 256kbps
 

A number of smaller, more independent artists use Bandcamp.com to sell their music. Band Camp lets you pay one price for the album and the choose the format, including FLAC and ALAC.
 
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About the only reason I buy from Amazon on occasion is because they have some
good discounts that are hard to pass up, if I don't own the album. For instance I bought
Satriani's Black Swans & Wormhole Wizards & Return to Forever's Romantic Warrior
for $5 each & for listening to music in a car & on an iPod, it seems to be good enough.
Though I do feel compelled to go buy the CDs at some point so I can have precious
ALAC.

 
Yeah, and that I can definitely understand. I just wish everyone would offer lossless audio instead of these lower-end recordings. Especially when they're going to hand me a 192 CBR and tell me it's 320 CBR.
 
Heck, one of the reasons I love Radiohead is because at this point they release all their music digitally and you can get WAV files for all their new albums.

 

[thuantran]

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If you look at the spectrals, AAC at 256 kbps goes higher than mp3 at the same bitrate, that does not necessarily mean it is better, or more faithful to the original. Every codec has to make compromises to get the audio to the desired size, if those aren't cutting frequencies above 18k, then they are somewhere else. I agree that AAC is theoretically a better codec, however, just because something replaces something else does not necessarily make it better. It could be a evolution from MP3 in simple the fact that it encodes faster, or files are smaller at a given bit rate ect... none of which have to do with the audio quality. At low bit rates AAC is more efficiant than MP3 (128 kbps aac is often compared to 160kpbs mp3), However, a good mp3 encoder (such as lame) makes up for most of this at higher bitrates. AAC would theoretically still be Superior, (Although I personally doubt anyone could hear a difference). I use flac myself, but if I had to use a lossey codec, I would choose mp3 for the simple reason that it plays on everything, not just iTunes.

I do agree that something new does not equal better but I would still prefer AAC for the few reasons. First, player support is just as good, at least for me. 2nd, I did DBT tests at 128kbps and I can discern them, at 256kbps I can't but still prefer the latter because of the theoretically better codec (latest statble LAME and Nero AAC, I used normal music with lot of details, not some test tones that only MP3 would distort, it's wrong to test something like that).
There's a few points I want to make about your assessment regardless:
. If you subtract the spectral of original file and the one with AAC or MP3. You will see that AAC not only goes higher but it retains other stuffs (again whether that can be heard by us is another matter).
. bit rates define how many bits you would uses for a second of audio so same bitrate same file size, or at least very close and well AAC does decodes faster in foobar2000 when I replaygain them .
 
 

 

[Snag1e]

 
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. bit rates define how many bits you would uses for a second of audio so same bitrate same file size, or at least very close and well AAC does decodes faster in foobar2000 when I replaygain them .
 
 

hahaha I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that =P Yes, they would be the same size. 8 bits = 1 Byte.....haha 
 
That is interesting that by subtracting the spectrals AAC is more faithful to the original, even below mp3s cutoff frequency...I didn't know that....